D&D (2024) New One D&D Playtest Document: 77 Pages, 7 Classes, & More!

There's a brand new playtest document for the new (version/edition/update) of Dungeons of Dragons available for download! This one is an enormous 77 pages and includes classes, spells, feats, and weapons.

Unearthed Arcana Playtest

Unearthed Arcana Playtest Materials Get Unearthed Arcana playtest content, try it out in your game, and provide feedback! Check back regularly for ...

www.dndbeyond.com

In this new Unearthed Arcana document for the 2024 Core Rulebooks, we explore material designed for the next version of the Player’s Handbook. This playtest document presents updated rules on seven classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue. This document also presents multiple subclasses for each of those classes, new Spells, revisions to existing Spells and Spell Lists, and several revised Feats. You will also find an updated rules glossary that supercedes the glossary of any previous playtest document.

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[Micah Sweet]

They already did… what were Per-Day features are now Per-Long-Rest. There are optional plug-in guidances in the Core Rules and Rules Expansions for changing up what as Long Rest means. It may not be outright stated, but you could easily redefine the time-lengths of rests based on the game-play loop and spatial-temporal zoom of the game in a given session/adventure/pillar of gameplay.

Though now I have been exposed to AngryGM's Tension Dice mechanic for tracking time and risk and complications, and I'm never going back. I'd love that sort of thing to be part of the 2024 DMG.

Why don't you just use those mechanics in your own games? Why do they have to be in the DMG?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I know I'm not the only one here who has espoused a preference for 1-hour short rests. Not going to dig back through 26 pages of this thread and all the other threads that have touched on this to find and cite the others who have seemed to support it. I also think they can speak well enough for themselves.

I think you might be the only one who thinks 1 hour Short Rests are perfect and need no changes, actually, looking back.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So I've rebuilt one of my players' characters (Level 7 Tiefling Glamour Bard) with the new UA - the previous version made with the Experts UA - and she's a little different. A couple less spells overall (all her healing spells are gone) and one more Bardic Inspiration. I personally prefer the Bardic Inspiration of the older UA (at least the Reaction rather than Bonus Action part), but whatyagonnado?

I'm gonna work on the party Paladin next. I think there might be a few bigger changes to be found there. I'm saving the party Rogue, only because I'm really looking forward to seeing what she can do.

Curious, how did you handle the spell list change? And did it have a major effect on the character's identity?

 

[Marandahir]

That would be an explicit shift to a much more gamist mindset than any non-4e edition has espoused.

It seems to me that what a lot of people here actually want is a game much closer to 4e than what we have. That's fine, but I think we would all benefit from that opinion being presented upfront. The biggest conflict that I see amongst veteran players is between those who prefer the direction 4e went with the game and want a return to that philosophy, or further, and those who prefer something like what we have, or like pre-4e philosophies (if not necessarily the actual rules).

Funnily enough, I don't think 4e was that gamist. Yes, it tried to outright balance the classes with similar amounts of AED-recharging powers/class features and give everyone choices of Utility powers/class features as well, but the books spent a similar amount of time looking at other pillars of gameplay and trying to present the game in meaningfully challenging ways. I think 4e was a different way of presenting rules that were broadly similar but perhaps more balanced than 3.5e, but it wasn't more or less gamist than its predecessors. I also think that 5e presents the rules quite differently than 4e, but amounts to a very similar game (especially to 4e as it existed from 2010 onward). How we want the game rules to be presented matters A LOT.

But trying to push this into "we want 4e in our 5e" versus "we want pre-4e in our 5e" sounds a lot like trying to stir the edition war pot again to me. I don't know if that's conducive to this discussion, and I think moreso the discussion should be directed toward "what features do we want our classes to have?" and "how do we want to present them?" and "how do we balance the classes and their recharge mechanics effectively?" and "how do these choices impact the fun of the game?" I don't think trying to boil it down into "like-X-edition" or "like-Y-edition" is a healthy lumping of the arguments, but maybe I'm just more of a splitter than a lumper…

I think that's not reasonable to ask for, but not perhaps for the reasons you might think.

Rather, this isn't a pre-existing opinion. A lot of the people who have expressed ideas that you're describing as '4E-like' are not people who actually think "I want a game that's more like 4E".

Agreed -- they MAY want a game more like 4e but they may not, but still want the same changes described above.

 

[Marandahir]

EDITED: Split out into separate post because I was editing it into the post when @Ruin Explorer liked the original post without this additional response, and I want to clearly delineate these as two separate subposts of the same overarching thread, which may or may not have the same reaction.

I think you might be the only one who thinks 1 hour Short Rests are perfect and need no changes, actually, looking back.

I don't want to put words in people's mouths or assume I know what they would say, but I've got a fewuser names in mind that I think would agree with me if they were posting right now. Or might half-agree with me. And WotC certainly seem to be testing bringing SRs back into the playtest, so I imagine that's evidence that a lot of people LIKE SR-recharge abilities too, and that the Prof.-Bonus / Day recharge abilities had reached the limitation of their usefulness in fixing the underlying balance problems. But that's just my guess…

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think that's not reasonable to ask for, but not perhaps for the reasons you might think.

Rather, this isn't a pre-existing opinion. A lot of the people who have expressed ideas that you're describing as '4E-like' are not people who actually think "I want a game that's more like 4E".

Rather, they're seeing the problems or limitations 5E has, and looking for solutions, and a lot of those solutions are naturally quite game-ist. I wouldn't say there's any real difference in game-ist-ness between that idea and "regain 100% of HP on a Long Rest" though. Neither is remotely simulationist. In fact, if anything, what he's describing is closer to narrativist, rather than game-ist.

I don't disagree. I really don't like full recovery on a long rest either, or nakedly gamist  or narrative mechanical solutions, except when necessary for gameplay to function. But if you want gamist solutions to these problems, you should say so, and as you say the most obvious example in D&D is 4e

 

[Marandahir]

I don't disagree. I really don't like full recovery on a long rest either, or nakedly gamist  or narrative mechanical solutions, except when necessary for gameplay to function. But if you want gamist solutions to these problems, you should say so, and as you say the most obvious example in D&D is 4e

Why don't you just use those mechanics in your own games? Why do they have to be in the DMG?

FYI -- I also don't love full recovery on a long rest, and plan to provide this feedback to WotC on the survey. I think it would be nice to have a third category of rest -- Extended Downtime -- built into the game as a core rule assumption, rather than as something in the DMG. And I DO use them in my own games. But I think the DMG and the PHB have meaning as they are the baselines used by everyone, and we're trying to establish and revise the baselines with the playtest.

 

[Micah Sweet]

FYI -- I also don't love full recovery on a long rest, and plan to provide this feedback to WotC on the survey. I think it would be nice to have a third category of rest -- Extended Downtime -- built into the game as a core rule assumption, rather than as something in the DMG. And I DO use them in my own games. But I think the DMG and the PHB have meaning as they are the baselines used by everyone, and we're trying to establish and revise the baselines with the playtest.

Actually, we're just expressing our opinions about the playtest. Nothing we do here will change anything about it one way or the other.

And I don't see why anyone's gaming preferences need to be shared by the community. We can just have a lot of options out there in the wild and let people decide what they want to play. Cubicle 7, Kobold, Paizo, EN Publishing, none of them are less valid options than WotC.

 

[mamba]

I think you might be the only one who thinks 1 hour Short Rests are perfect and need no changes, actually, looking back.

I hate short rests, but a 5 min short rest is even worse than a 1 hour one. At that time, why not recharge everything after each encounter, or better yet, immediately

 

[DEFCON 1]

People disagree as to how exactly Short Rests should be changed or eliminated, but it's a surprisingly close to unanimous agreement that "1 hour Short Rests" suck.

I would imagine just from our informal remembrances of threads here that 1-hour SRs I think tend to be looked down upon more often than not, I agree. Sure there are some who are probably fine with them, but most I seem to recall being meh about them.

But I will also say there's the additional side (which I happen to belong to) which is that we know 1-hour Short Rests are irritating... but that changing them to a length of time I like is so easy that I don't actually care what the book does or does not eventually include. If they leave it as 1 hour or change it to 10 minutes, 3 hours, 5 minutes, 1 minute, or whatever... it doesn't mater to me, I'm going to use the time period I myself am most happy with (10 minutes).

So while I can appreciate folks trying to fight for their preferred length... I don't tend to join in because I'm going to just do what I do at the end of the day anyway.